Long before I studied psychology I was captivated by the idea of ‘multiple personalities’. Sybil, The Three Faces of Eve, The Minds of Billy Milligan: I found it fascinating to imagine a world ‘inside’ the human being that mirrored the world ‘outside’, with different personalities collaborating, fighting, and scheming against each other. Was it really possible, for instance, that the party girl ‘Eve Black’ could be doing all those things behind the prim Eve White's back? Perhaps my fascination came from my desire to play with my own identity. By the age of six, I had decided to change my name from ‘Michael’ (my first name) to ‘Barry’ (my second name), on the grounds that the former seemed unbelievably dull. Then, in my late teens, I changed it again to ‘Mick’ (‘The most working class variant of “Michael” you could find’, a friend sneered).

I never went on to study ‘dissociative identity disorder’ – the current term for multiple personality as a clinical condition. I did, however, co-edit a book on ‘multiplicity in everyday life’ (The plural self), and wrote a thesis on how facial masks could bring out the different sides of ourselves. And, indeed, the idea that the each of us have different ‘parts’, ‘voices’, or ‘subpersonalities’ is now well-established across the psychological and psychotherapeutic literature. As introduced in Chapter 1, for instance, one of the most common – and best evidenced – psychotherapy techniques is to invite clients to talk ‘as’ different parts of themselves as they sit in different chairs (two-chair work). In one chair, for instance, the client might be asked to express their self-critical part (‘You’re so stupid, why do you always do what your boyfriend tells you to?’) and then to sit in another chair as the part that is being berated and respond (‘I just can't help it, I feel so little and small’). The idea is then to develop the dialogue between these two parts, such that more cooperative forms of relating can be found. Such a ‘pluralistic’ conception of the self sits very closely to the model of human being described in Chapter 3, with different needs and wants ‘within’ the person having the capacity to pull in different directions, acting as semi-autonomous agencies within a more encompassing whole.